In my post about living with autism, I mentioned an incident from boarding school: I once took a phone message for a fellow pupil to call his family urgently. His father had died. I didn’t deliver the message. When the hostel was queried that evening, I looked around at everyone else, thinking “who could forget … Continue reading In which Randolph doesn’t fit through a window→

This is one of the hardest posts I've ever written. On a late afternoon in July 1991, I spent several long minutes in a police holding cell, at the Randburg police station, to think about what I had done earlier that day. In 1990 and halfway through 1991, I spent 18 months of hell at … Continue reading In which Randolph avoids doing hard time→

When I was ten years old I almost died*. It was a Thursday afternoon at 4:50pm. The very last episode of my favourite show in the world, The Littles, was starting at 5pm and my mother had just asked me to go to the corner store and get bread and milk. I suggested that it … Continue reading In which Randolph is hit by a car and nearly dies→

Growing up, my parents had friends who themselves had three kids. The eldest (let's call him Robert) and I got on quite well on a computer nerd level, but he was far more physically coordinated than me. This was especially evident in his ability to climb trees when we were much younger. Mostly I was … Continue reading In which Randolph falls out of a tree→

One of the best sites on the Internet is also one of the most toxic. No, I'm not talking about Twitter, but Stack Overflow. In previous posts I've referenced my own issues with the Stack network, and a few years ago I cancelled my account entirely due to the toxicity of some of its members … Continue reading This made my day→

[Last edited 5 December 2018.] A few weeks ago I started limiting my time on Twitter significantly, although I reactivated my account a couple of weeks later and it was like I never left. One network I feel more strongly about is Facebook, a company I describe as evil without a hint of irony. I … Continue reading Wither social media?→